t21Alliance

Saturday, November 19, 2011

A Good and Perfect Gift: Review by Lisa Morguess

I was contacted by the publicist for the the publishing house that
released this book earlier this month, asking if I would read it and
feature it on my blog. Always interested in personal accounts of
raising a child with Down syndrome, I was happy to oblige.

In
this book, Amy Julia Becker tells a somewhat familiar story: full of
hopes and dreams, she gives birth to a baby, shortly thereafter learns
the baby has Down syndrome, experiences the shock and grief so many of
us parents experience with that diagnosis, struggles to come to terms
with it all, and eventually finds some semblance of peace. On a very
general level, her story is not so different from my own, and so on a
very general level I was able to relate.

However,
her entire struggle to come to terms with her daughter's diagnosis is
framed within her devout Christianity, and to this I could not at all
relate. She struggles to reconcile her daughter's "imperfection" with
the belief that her daughter is created in God's image. She struggles
to find some divine meaning in her daughter's Down syndrome: is it a
lesson from God? A punishment? A divine reward?

Additionally,
Amy Julia and her husband are both highly educated high-achievers, and
the author struggles mightily with the knowledge that her daughter, by
virtue of having Down syndrome, has cognitive impairments. Although at
some point in the book, she attempts to convey finally coming to terms
with that and being able to see her daughter's value apart from her
intelligence and abilities, I never got the sense that she actually did
find a way to separate her daughter's value from her abilities.
Throughout the latter half of the book, she spends a lot of time talking
about all of her daughter's accomplishments (and at one point, when her
daughter was a mere 14 months old, she and her husband buy a special
treadmill for their daughter, determined to get her walking - I
absolutely cringed at this). In fact, by her telling, her daughter does
seem on the higher end of ability as far as Down syndrome goes, but I
have to wonder how she would feel if her daughter were one of the
children with Down syndrome who didn't walk until age 3, was non-verbal
at age 5, and so forth.

Amy Julia Becker is a
talented writer, but her story didn't resonate with me. I understand
that she wanted to tell her story from her perspective, but framing it
from such a devoutly Christian perspective constructs a barrier between
her and non-Christian readers/parents of children with Down syndrome.
This is not the worst memoir I've read about having a child with Down
syndrome, but not the best either.